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You Done With PS3 and 360 Yet?

I feel like this fall is about the right time to really start looking back on the last generation of console games. One thing that involves I think is taking inventory of any games in your PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, DS, or PSP libraries you still haven’t played or finished yet. It’s time to ask if you’re really done playing those machines.

I held off last year because I felt like the generational transition wasn’t instant. Most of what we’ve seen on the PS4 and Xbox One is also on the old consoles. Not much has been designed exclusively for the new machines. We have a few decent exclusives, but I have a feeling we’ll look back on them three years from now and not be as impressed. If you look forward to 2015 though, that seems to be when most of the major next-gen-only games are going to start to come out. That year will begin with some fairly heavy hitters in the winter and spring, and every console manufacturer will have at least one “hero” game ready next fall. I feel like 2015 is going to be the real beginning, perhaps in the way 2007 was for the PS3 and 360.

A lot of the content of this blog has essentially dealt with my backlog, whether it’s simply talking about its mass or doing a Late to the Party post whenever I manage to clear a game off the pile. If you look back at all those posts though, I think you’ll notice a distinct lack of very recent games. Most of the games I do LTTP blogs for are very old.

The truth is, my PS3 and 360 backlogs are actually very small. I think between them I have four unplayed discs. For the 360 I have an unplayed disc of Tales of Vesperia and an unplayed copy of Crackdown is sitting on its hard drive. The only actual PS3 game disc I have that I feel I haven’t played enough is Dragon’s Crown. Other than that it’s The Sly Collection and Ratchet & Clank Collection — two sets of PS2 games. I guess you could also count the fact that I still haven’t touched Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown. And I’m pretty sure I’m done buying games for those consoles. Persona 4 Ultimax is probably going to be the last new game I buy on PS3.

Another question I’ve recently asked myself is “What games are keeping my PS3 and 360 hooked up?” For 360 it’s pretty much just the aforementioned unplayed games, plus Rez HD which we’ll probably never see on another platform. Horde mode in Gears of War 3 was the last reason I held on to Xbox Live Gold. The PS3 has a few more classics I could definitely see myself coming back to. I feel like Uncharted 2, along with the others in the series, will get ported to PS4, but until then I’ll hold onto it on PS3. Street Fighter IV is the one multiplayer game I care about on PS3 that still get’s significant updates. I guess I could switch to the PC version (more on that later) but I just haven’t yet. One of my top reasons to keep the PS3 around is ironically a PS2 collection — Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. My top PS3 keepsake however is probably Demon’s Souls, for which I still think about starting a new character from time to time.

As much as people ignored the original Wii over the last several years, out of all these consoles it’s host to my biggest backlog: Rhythm Heaven Fever, Endless Ocean along with its sequel, Punch-Out!!, and Xenoblade. I’m even considering buying New Super Mario Bros. Wii. The good thing about my Wii backlog though is I can just play everything on a Wii U if I ever get one.

Where the last-generation backlog really sneaks up on me is on the DS and PSP. It’s not even just the quantity of games I own but haven’t played on those systems, it’s the length of each one. They’re almost all 30-plus-hour RPGs.

On PSP it’s the first Disgaea game, Corpse Party, Maverick Hunter X, the first Prinny game, and maybe Valkyria Chronicles II. All those handheld games easily amount to hundreds of hours of gameplay. Once again however, the successors to these platforms are backwards compatible.

The last thing I need to bring up is my PC library. My Steam backlog is an ever-present thing that will affect me for years to come. However, it contains several games that I would otherwise have bought on the PS3 or 360, so you can sort of count those as unplayed PS3 and/or 360 games that I simply chose to buy on PC. In that case they might actually comprise most of of my backlog for those systems.

Looking at all that, I find myself kind of lucky my biggest last-gen backlogs are the ones I can just bring over to the latest hardware if I need to, the ultimate case being PC. People usually complain about a handful of games keeping their old consoles around by in my case on the PS3 and 360 it’s just a tiny handful of games. To be honest this was part of the reason I bought a lot of games on PC — as a sort of longer-lasting conservation effort.